News briefs and information from Federal agencies and Capitol Hill on government activities, legislation, and grants of interest to the telemedicine, telehealth, and health IT community. Edited by Carolyn Bloch.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

UC Davis IPHI Launches CHeQ

The Institute for Population Health Improvement (IPHI) at UC Davis Health System has established the California Health eQuality (CHeQ) program. CHeQ seeks to improve healthcare quality and coordinate care by using HIE technology to facilitate the rapid flow of information to physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare providers.

Through a 16 month $17.5 million interagency agreement with the California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS), CHeQ will develop and implement HIE programs according to the state’s cooperative Grant Agreement with ONC. From March 2010 to August 2012, CHHS had used CaleConnect, a nonprofit corporation as California’s state-designated governance entity

Care will be expanded to underserved communities and enable the exchange of health information or access to Direct, a simple standards-based way for senders to push secure encrypted health information directly to trusted recipients over the internet. CHeQ also will improve sharing of immunization, laboratory, and care information and provide tools to assist providers in identifying private, secure, standardized, and trusted systems.

Kenneth W. Kizer, Director of the IPHI will lead CHeQ. He has served as Chair, President, and CEO of Medsphere Systems Corporation and Founding President and CEO of the National Quality Forum, a Washington D.C. quality improvement and consensus standards-setting organization. He also served as the Under Secretary for Health for the VA.

“We want care-related information to flow safely and quickly between and among healthcare providers. No more printing, scanning, and faxing laboratory and X-ray results,” Kizer said. “Through CHeQ, we are committed to advancing use of secure electronic exchanges of information so that care for the patient is better and the job of providing high quality care is easier for the caregiver.”

Pamela Lane, CHHS Deputy Secretary for HIE, responsible for the state’s Cooperative Grant Agreement, said, “Under IPHI, the new organization will enable CHHS to achieve an important long term goal for HIE to use data to improve population health outcomes in California.”

CHeQ will be a collaborative effort among CHHS, other state agencies, state healthcare stakeholders, patients, healthcare professionals, payers, provider, and health plans. Additionally, on November 1-2, 2012, CHHS and CHeQ will convene the state’s HIE meeting “Transforming Healthcare: 2012 California HIE Stakeholder Summit” to be held in Sacramento.

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